Students Must Organize to Stop Escalating Budget Cuts

Letter to the Editor of the Daily Tar Heel about Budget Cuts Crisis

The university is finally taking a step in the right direction by “chopping from the top" and cutting 900 administrative positions across the UNC system. However, these cuts came only after job and benefit cuts for many workers, including housekeepers and groundspeople, for years.

The university should not raise tuition for anyone in this period. While in-state tuition rates are limited by law, out-of-state rates have risen close to $20,000 a year.

We believe that education is a right, just like it is asserted in the UN International Declaration of Human Rights. With the proposed tuition increases, UNC shuts the door to higher education for hundreds of current and potential students who will no longer be able to afford attending this university. These tuition hikes will hit those of us who depend on financial aid and those who work to pay for school the hardest. The university should find the money it would raise from these tuition hikes from the salaries of its richest administrative staff.

We are seeing skyrocketing tuition and dramatically fewer class sections needed to graduate, and at the same time the U.S. continues to spend hundreds of billions of failed wars and occupations, rather than fund education. On top of that the state government refuses to tax corporations, even though there is little real evidence that low tax rates keep jobs.To make things worse, there are fewer jobs for young workers to pay off their debt.

It is time for our generation to take back our education and declare loud and clear, "Education is our right!" But as history has shown, only those who struggle to defend their rights have any hope of attaining them in reality. We must organize to secure our right to an education and to a future.